Custom program presents a video installation by Emily Clayton created for the space of the gallery. In this new work, Clayton looks at the negotiations between dominant and submissive forces in physical, sexual, and social relationships. The power relations she explores are limited in scale – body against body, sexual negotiations between two lovers, and the act of withholding work from a viewer. Within the one-to-one containment that Clayton exercises, these relationships reflect the uncontrollable social and political moment and comment upon larger power dynamics that often create unintended results.

Emily Clayton is a New York based artist dealing in the pleasure and discomfort of the body. Her work has been exhibited at Kate Werble, NY; Susan Inglett, NY; Launch F18, NY, 80WSE, NY; and Roots and Culture, Chicago. She received an MFA in 2015 from New York University.

Custom Program is pleased to announce the opening of the Custom Program Project Space. The inaugural exhibition will present an interactive light installation by Lindsay Packer.

Packer treats light as a material, creating analog RGB color spaces often using objects found on site and her own simple toolkit. Her work comes out of a practice of improvisation developed through an intimacy with the nuanced properties of common materials. For each new project or iteration of her work, the site provides a new set of terms that she can work with or manipulate, allowing her to create temporary, immersive environments. Within the installation’s duration, her work alters the viewers relationship to the materials in use, asking which is more real: the object or the image? For this installation, Packer invites the viewer to aid in the creation and reorganization of the space. Using materials that are native to the environment, she plays with the space’s intended function, expanding it at once into an archive, workshop, and luminous tableau.

Lindsay Packer’s light-based installations, performances, videos and photography have been featured at Transmitter, Present Company, NURTUREart, and The Chocolate Factory Theater, among other spaces. She received a BFA from RISD, an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to India in Installation Art, and has twice been Artist in Residence at the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation. Packer regularly conducts workshops on light and color for undergraduates and other audiences and lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.